​This is one of those stories I didn’t think I’d ever need to write about. Seventeen years ago, the CIA declassified a silly transcript of a “psychic” probe of ancient Martian civilization, and no one paid it much mind until an online version was included in the CIA’s recent release of declassified material in its new Reading Room. I threw a copy up in my Library months ago because I thought it was amusing, but I didn’t bother to highlight it in my blog. However, thanks to the Mysterious Universe podcast, it attracted the attention of Slate magazine, and Slatedecided to ask whether America really made contact with ancient Martians from a million years ago.

​According to the CIA document, in May of 1984, a CIA agent asked a remote viewer to give a reading based on a location sealed in an envelope. That location was Mars c. 1 million BCE. The remote viewer’s name isn’t in the file, but Joe McMoneagle later claimed credit for the adventure in a 1993 book. A 2001 book claimed that the agent who questioned him was F. Holmes “Skip” Atwater, but McMoneagle says that it was a man named Robert Monroe.

The subject, McMoneagle, claimed to see large pyramids and a landscape decimated by a geological disaster. This landscape was populated by giants: “I just keep seeing very large people. They appear thin and tall, but they're very large. Ah...wearing some kind of strange clothes.” These people faced ruin from volcanoes, so they climbed into a flying saucer: “It looks like the inside of a larger boat. Very rounded walls and shiny metal.” McMoneagle claimed to see hibernation chambers and believed that the Martian race was going extinct due to environmental change.

Jacob Brogan of the “Future Tense” blog, a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University, became intrigued by the document and sought out the allegedly psychic remote viewer behind the project. McMoneagle is now an old man with a long track record of failed psychic predictions (such as his claim that in the early 2000s people would stop wearing clothing and turn to temporary body tattoos), but he claims to remember every detail of the 1984 session. He assured Brogan that neither he nor Monroe knew the contents of the envelope prior to the session, and both assumed he was targeting a location on Earth until the big reveal. Even though McMoneagle professes to be fascinated by ancient Martian life and to want to visit Mars, he bizarrely chose never to use his “gift” to explore Mars again, saying he didn’t “like” targeting other worlds because there is no way to “verify” the information. So that means he doesn’t trust his own psychic perceptions?

The story McMoneagle told does not entirely add up. Despite claiming to have had no knowledge of any of the details for the test, for example, he claims to know that the Army specifically requested this particular test, though he declined to speculate about why they would ask the CIA to perform it. If taken at face value, this suggests that at least some information was leaking to McMoneagle and this was not a truly double-blind experiment.

Brogan did not interview any skeptics for his story, and failed to note the striking similarities between Brogan’s vision of a Mars populated by a tall, dying race in pyramids and pop culture images of Mars from the middle twentieth century. The “Face on Mars” had recently been a big deal, and claims for vast pyramid fields on Mars were well-known among fringe types. Richard Hoagland hadn’t yet published his Monuments of Mars (1987), but discussions of the Viking images were nevertheless already popular among UFO types. David L. Chandler, for example, wrote about the “pyramids” of Mars in 1979’s Life on Mars, and in 1975, the pyramids of Mars were even mentioned in Congressional hearings on the space program, though with the caveat that “It does not follow that there are Martian Pharaohs.” (Doctor Who disagreed in the classic story “The Pyramids of Mars” in 1975.) Martin Marietta Aerospace’s 1975 book on the Viking Mars mission, published in their role as the official contractor for the mission, specifically referenced Percival Lowell’s Victorian claims of an ancient and dying Martian race and their vast constructions. From Lowell’s inspiration, science fiction writers from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Aleksey Tolstoy to Robert Heinlein wrote of dying Martian races and their fabulous civilization. Consider Burroughs: “The last poor, mean structures of a dying race have either disappeared or are only mouldering ruins now; but the splendid structures of her prime remain at the edge of the plateau, mute but eloquent reminders of her vanished grandeur.”

It is hardly shocking that when McMoneagle tried to describe Mars, he reached for the popular view of the era, at least among sci-fi geeks and paranormalists. The question, then, is how McMoneagle either learned or deduced that the place in question during this session was Mars and not the Earth. Since the recordings of the session have never been released, we can’t know what kind of nonverbal communication occurred, nor whether there were any opportunities for McMoneagle to have overheard or read the target prior to the session. Brogan’s own article suggested that the sessions might have been partly staged as propaganda to goad the Soviets into wasting money on fruitless psychic research. If that were the case, then letting slip what the target is would actually have been a feature and not a bug in the performance.

"That location was Mars c. 1 million BCE. " The most intriguing part is how did the CIA got hold of a picture or a "readable" location that was a million years ago....

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gdave

3/21/2017 12:19:38 pm

They wouldn't have had a picture. Remote viewing experiments sometimes used a photo of a target. More often, however, they used map coordinates, or sometimes names or descriptions of locations. If this story is at all factual, the envelope would probably have just contained a slip of paper literally saying "Mars c. 1 million BCE". The whole point of the CIA's remote viewing experiments was to gather intelligence on targets they couldn't get through conventional means - particularly targets they couldn't photograph.

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Shane Sullivan

3/21/2017 01:40:45 pm

GDave is right. Here's an equally reputable psychic doing the same thing:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/21/Carnac.jpg

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Scott David Hamilton

3/21/2017 10:22:54 am

Pedantic Doctor Who Trivia Mode: On.

Sutekh the Destroyer was not Martian, he was an Osiran. His home planet was Phaester Osiris. He was just imprisoned on Mars.

Pedantic Doctor Who Trivia Mode: Off.

This Pedantic Doctor Who Trivia was brought to you by High School Virginity. High School Virginity, because memorizing the minutiae of British children's television is more fun than talking to girls.

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Naughtius

3/21/2017 01:39:52 pm

If the location was in an envelope, how did he figure it was Mars and not Earth?

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Dubious f

3/21/2017 03:07:10 pm

Well, according to gdave and shane, the paper in the envelope IS the remote location. Probably looked at the envelope toward a sunlit window...

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Bob Jase

3/21/2017 02:28:52 pm

Damn, McGonigle was lucky he wasn't psychicly stepped on by a thoat.

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At Risk

3/21/2017 02:36:23 pm

Frankly, I think it might be good that the CIA wasted its time and resources on psychic probes of ancient Martian civilization, to perhaps distract and limit them from such atrocities as probing the human mind with various drugs:

Sounds like more Project Stargate nonsense. Remember "Major Ed Dames"? He used to appear on Art Bell's show maybe a couple times a year and his main thing was predicting "The Killshot" a disaster on a planetary scale. Kept moving the date into the future on each visit. If I recall correctly, claimed to have once tried to remote view Satan. Taught something he called "Technical Remote Viewing" to boneheads.

Isn't Robert Monroe the guy who literally wrote the book on out of body experiences?

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Pharaon

3/21/2017 05:40:20 pm

And then there's of course the martian sphinx from "Edison conquers the martians".

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Clete

3/22/2017 01:13:57 am

I once knew someone who was arrested for remote viewing. He was using a telescope to look in windows several blocks away. The police, for some reason, took exception to what he was doing.

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Maybe Another Kook

3/22/2017 08:48:04 am

I am surprised the connection between the CIA, Mars and former president Obama has not been extolled more prominently.
Three whistleblowers have outed the former POTUS as having traveled to Mars through a Stargate as a CIA operative. Some accounts even mention they manipulated time in their journeys.

I can actually provide you with a sliver of firsthand factual information here that may shed much more light on this remote viewing of Mars episode. Like Zelig --- or maybe more like Forrest Gump --- I was there to witness history up close and personal.

First of all, I quote from the CIA document you linked to. Please pay special attention to the date and to the initial Longitude/Latitude coordinates on Mars that were given to Joe McMoneagle.

===========
“In the May 22, 1984 remote viewing session recorded below and declassified in August of 2000, a CIA agent questioned a psychic about the ancient history of Mars, c. one million years BCE.”
=======

Selected geographic coordinates, provided by the parties requesting the information, were verbally given to the subject during the interview.

DATE: May 22, 1984

MON: All right now, using the information in the envelope I've provided, exclusively focusing your attention now, using the information in the envelope, focus on: 40.89 degrees north 9.55 degrees west

SUB: ........... I want to say it looks like ah....I don't know, it sort of looks ....I kind of got an oblique view of a ah..pyramid or pyramid form. It's very high, it's kind of sitting in a... large depressed area.
================

Tom Mellett: Those coordinates on Mars will be mighty familiar to all devoted students of Richard C. Hoagland because they fall right in the small area called Cydonia.

http://www.crystalinks.com/faceonmars.html

In one of the images taken by Viking 1 on July 25, 1976, a 2 km (1.2 miles) long Cydonian mesa, situated at 40.75° north latitude and 9.46° west longitude, had the appearance of a humanoid "Face on Mars".
================

Here's where I as Zelig/Gump come in. From 1981 until his death in 1995, I became a close personal friend of Arthur M. Young (1905-1995), inventor of the Bell-47 helicopter (the ones you see on M*A*S*H), and founder of the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley, CA in 1973.

Now, if I may quote from page 236 of the Picknett and Prince book from 1999, The Stargate Conspiracy:

“Arthur M. Young's highly influential Institute for the Study of Consciousness at Berkeley, founded in 1972, also provided a forum for some of the most daring thinkers of the day. It was here that Richard Hoagland had his meeting with Paul Shay of SRI, and also where he gave his first lecture about Cydonia in 1984.”

===============

Since I was present at that 1984 lecture and still have the program notes, I can verify for you that the date of that Hoagland lecture at ISC entitled “The Case for the Face on Mars,” was January 26, 1984, a solid 4 months before the McMoneagal remote viewing session of May 22, 1984. Now let's set up a time line:

July 1983
Hoagland was working at SRI on a project involving the rings of Saturn, when he became interested in the images being enhanced by SRI from the 1976 Viking mission that photographed Mars. That's when he saw the features in the Cydonia region and interpreted them as not just the Face on Mars, but also the 5-sided D&M Pyramid and a complex he called The City and even identified a Fortress.

October 1983
[Quoting excerpts from pp. 122-124 of the Stargate Conspiracy book]:
“Hoagland decided to set up a project to study these features further. He approached SRI and in October 1983, met its vice-president for corporate affairs, former intelligence author Paul Shay, at the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in Berkeley, California (founded by Arthur M. Young). This was to prove a significant meeting. Shay recommended that he [Hoagland] collaborate with Lambert Dolphin, Jr., the physicist who had led SRI teams in Giza between 1973 and 1982.”

December 1983
“Hoagland and Dolphin formed the Independent Mars Mission (IMM) with $50,000 from SRI's 'President's Fund', an internal funding source under the discretion of SRI's President, Dr. William Miller.”

January 26, 1984
“The first lecture given by Hoagland and Pozos on the work of the Independent Mars Mission took place at the Institute for the Study of Consciousness in early 1984. [ . . . ] The involvement of SRI in anything seems enough to ring alarm bells . . . and now they were funding Hoagland's Mars Mission, after having sent Dolphin to Giza in the 1970s.”

May 22, 1984
Joe McMoneagle's remote viewing session on the ancient features on Mars (probably took place at Ft. Meade, MD, but possibly at SRI in Menlo Park, CA.)

July 1984
The Independent Mars Mission --- with its SRI funding and resources --- lasted for several months, until July 1984, when it presented its findings at a conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Their conclusions were that the anomalous features of Cydonia were suggestive of ar

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Tom Mellett

3/24/2017 09:16:30 pm

(reached the Comment length limit just before the end)

July 1984
The Independent Mars Mission --- with its SRI funding and resources --- lasted for several months, until July 1984, when it presented its findings at a conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Their conclusions were that the anomalous features of Cydonia were suggestive of artificial construction, and that efforts should be made to return to Mars to study them further.”

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Dubious f

3/25/2017 12:15:30 pm

Cydonia was remote read! That reader needed glasses because in reality, that region is way way more intricate than that face picture. http://www.space.com/17191-face-on-mars.html

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mike f

7/16/2017 04:06:12 pm

So it says he had a failed reading about people wearing temporary body tattoos instead of clothes, thats funny because it was a big fad for a while there I even saw a segment on tv about it. They had women walk down the street with painted on clothes in different parts of I think New York or some big city just to see if anyone would notice. So failed prediction...not really a remote viewing does not always give you all the information about what you are seeing, more like bits and pieces of a puzzle.

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